Our Lady of the Goldfinch
Just one—yellow, yes, seemingly lonely
on her lap. Though she pets it, though the color
is complicated by others—darker ones,
even against the morning’s orange air . . .
and then the striped wings in a child’s hand.
Two slender, distant trees.
And there are boys. The whole truth lying
on the grass. The rock they sit on—browning
like a velvet moss, bugs and petals crowding bare
feet. A net of pine.
She can imagine someone,
someone to tell.
And sky, somehow, ripping through the fabric of a cloud,
her dress. As though her clothing tears from the inside, begins
to shred.
Everything needs stitching.
And night shows through—
in glimpses
if we could see its cracks (and needles
needles
needles
needles
across the entire canvas).
Our Lady of the Chair
It will not be electric,
not for this exercise.
It’s a simple chair,
a calm chair.
Wooden.
in a wooden room.
Nothing else
in the room.
Nothing in the chair
that we can see.
© 2021 Sarah Maclay
Sarah Maclay’s The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence, a braided collaboration with Holaday Mason (What Books Press), follows Music from the Black Room; her first full-length, Whore, which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and The White Bride, a book of prose poems (all, UT Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, Manoa, Blackbird, Hotel Amerika, The Best American Erotic Poetry, Poetry Daily, The Writer’s Chronicle, and Poetry International, where she served as book review editor for a decade. Her poetry has been supported by a COLA Master Artist Fellowship and a Yaddo residency, and awarded a Pushcart Special Mention.
From 2008 – 2011, she served as artistic director of The 3rd Area, a reading series based in galleries in DTLA and Bergamot Station. A Montana native, graduate of Oberlin and VCFA, she teaches at LMU and conducts periodic workshops at Beyond Baroque.
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